For this week’s filmic interlude, that I put up whilst I have a 25 hours break from politics and stuff, really needs no introduction and no description from me of the plot, Many people will be intimately familiar with George Orwell’s magnificent 1948 imagining of a future in the year 1984 where ‘Airstrip One’, formerly the United Kingdom, is a place of fear, control and oppression.
Orwell, a left winger who in a previous work ‘Animal Farm’, illustrated how socialist revolution inevitably morphs into dictatorship and oppression, provided in 1984 another vision of a dystopian future. Sadly, although Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning as to what authoritarianism and authoritarian ideologies could become, or create; Her Majesty’s Government, on the other hand, appears to be treating 1984 as if it were an instruction manual.
Today’s Britain is rather too far down the road for my liking that leads to ‘thought police’, ‘thought crimes’ and ‘newspeak’ although there are some differences between Orwell’s nightmare world and the Britain that we have to live in today. Although there are not ‘thought crimes’ there are instead ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws that silence dissent and warp the justice system away from equality before the law and into a situation where some people are treated more advantageously by the justice system as others. In place of the slogans of 1984’s Big Brother, ‘War Is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’ we have today the slogans ‘Diversity is our Strength’, ‘All cultures are equal’ and ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. The free world that Orwell knew in 1948 is gone, now Britain is not a place where authors like Orwell and others could freely speculate on the state of the world and the human condition, it is now the land where people are arrested for telling jokes or failing to grieve at the required time and at the permitted ‘grief target’.
This is not the best or the most well known film version of 1984, and it is a very loose and free adaptation, but it is one that contains a cornucopia of the best acting talent that Britain could provide when the movie was made in 1956. Jan Sterling, David Kossoff, Michael Redgrave and Donald Pleasance are just a few of the names that grace this film. I enjoyed this very free adaptation of the Orwell novel. Not only do I hope that you enjoy it too, but you also take it as inspiration to stand up and fight for your right, your inalienable right, to speak freely about whatever concerns, annoys or inspires you, even if the Left do scream abuse at you for doing so.
